Resident Evil 4 Is Being Remade By Fans

Two fans named Albert and Cris – and no I'm not making this up, it's a slight alteration on the names of arch enemies Chris Redfield and Albert Wesker from the Resident Evil series – have been working together to completely overhaul Resident Evil 4 HD for PC. They're actually making the game in proper HD.

Over the years Capcom has done a really poor job with certain PC ports of Resident Evil games, with the egregious being the first Resident Evil 4 port done by Ubisoft. It was a mess and that's putting it nicely and mildly. Well, as reported by Kotaku, the 2014 release of Resident Evil 4 Ultimate HD Edition for PC isn't properly in high definition and both Cris and Albert are doing something about it.

The duo are not only replacing all of the low fidelity textures in the PC version of the game but they're also replacing many of the models as well. They're making proper 3D objects for many of the environmental entities as well as fixing the game's structures, logos and decorations. You can see how it looks in a preview of the texture patch with the video demonstration below.

Over on the official project page for the fan remake of Resident Evil 4 HD, Albert explains that many of the textures and props they've had to redo have been a tedious process...

This time, like in the Village area, most of the textures are full re-creations. From now on, the majority of textures you see in the game are quite random (with some exceptions). Some of them were taken directly by Capcom staff but its randomness makes it impossible to find the originals in real life. And some of them are based on textures you can find on the Internet (with patience and a bit of luck ;)). But many times even if we find the original textures, they are not at a high enough resolution to be usable. Consequently, we must re-create them from scratch anyway.

Recreating textures from scratch is no easy task. If you're not a Photoshop wizard you'll need to do a lot of patchwork to make the texture look realistic. In the case of Resident Evil 4, I can only imagine how difficult it must be for the duo to search out certain surface types to replace. For more obscure textures, like for symbols or original designs, it might require more than just copying an image, doubling its size and saving it as an “HD” upgrade. That sometimes would work for altering the textures in GTA IV.

In the case of Resident Evil 4 Ultimate HD Edition, the team really has their work cut out for them. The original PC release of Resident Evil 4 also had an HD do-over by various members of the gaming community, but that wasn't so much about bringing the game up to the standards of HD as it was just making sure that the game wasn't a blurry mess.

The team working on this HD remake are releasing the upgrades in segments, so you can download the village right now from over on the official website.